My Emacs Peripherals

After several months' use, I get myself familiar with Emacs gradually.  It is a really powerful editor, with everything you want included, such as calendar, calculator, reading & sending email, and especially, Org mode.

Although an extremely useful tool by itself, Org mode does not have much support outside Emacs.  For example, it is not so easy for me to add an entry using my smartphone.  Thus, I decide to continue using Google Calendar along with Org mode.

To integrate these two things, I wrote a Python script called Pull GCal to fetch Google Calendar entries to a local Org file, which can be added to org-agenda-files to be used in Org mode.  The result satisfies me a lot, though the buffer-reverting messages from time to time are quite annoying.

Above is a part of my Org weekly agenda view, the "Grad Photo" entry was fetched from Google Calendar, and was saved in a local file called gcal.org.  Quite nice, right?

Another thing I managed to do is using online dictionary in Emacs.  Since English is not my native language, I need to refer to online dictionaries quite a lot, among which I prefer Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary.  Unfortunately, it does not have a Dictionary Server (at least I do not know it has one).

To solve this problem, I wrote MWDict, which includes a Python script to fetch and parse dictionary entries, and integration with Emacs (mwdict.el) as well as completion support for Bash and Emacs.

Dictionary entry displayed in Emacs

MWDict Completion in Emacs

With these two tools in hands, I feel more and more addicted to Emacs.